I'm currently specing a 1U to run Gentoo at work for compiles and builds. I'm currently zeroing in on the Xi BladeRAIDer 64 [http://www.xicomputer.com/products/bladeraiderop.asp] from XI Computer Corp. I have a few questions going forward, but I'm pretty sure this will work.

As for installing, I assume I'm just going to use the 1.4-rc4 for x86, and it will just work as a 32-Bit system (using a few different flags than a stock system). Are there any tricks or gotchas that I should know about for day to day usage that would differ from my normal Gentoo experience? (I'm currently running 3 Gentoo servers/workstations at home/work) In the XI docs it says "Fully tested and supported for x86 32-Bit LINUX or Windows Operating Systems" so I think this means that I can just use it as a 'normal' 32-bit system for now, with the option of recompiling the system for 64-bit usage in the future. Currently our app runs on 32-bit systems; AIX/Solaris/Linux/win32 - with some preliminary work being done on Solaris 64-bit. Having the option of a 64-bit Linux to expand to is very compelling (especially since I'm the one porting our apps and promoting their usage in Linux) but the primary focus will be on 32-bit for some time.

One more question, would there be any benefit to me getting a Dual proc? I ask because the only things the box will be used for will be:

I don't think any of these would benefit too much from duals (this is just an in house box so Samba and Apache deal with distributing code/installers to a dev group of about 15) and I'd rather put the $ towards more RAM. I can spec the Opteron 240 with 2 Gig of RAM for ~2022$, which is within my budget easily.

At least Apache can benefit from Dual proc, but it probably wont be necessary. Do single proc Opteron exist?? Also we have a 64 bit port that's almost ready. The 32-bit x86 version just works, at least on the systems that I have tested._________________Tester
tester@gentoo.org